Premiers form health innovation group that looks beyond Ottawa

[start_gallery][end_gallery]British Columbia Premier Christy Clark, centre, chairs a meeting of the Council of the Federation as Quebec Premier Jean Charest, left, and Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty, right, look on in Victoria, B.C. Monday, Jan. 16, 2012. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jonathan Hayward

VICTORIA – The provincial premiers have gone from demanding Prime Minister Stephen Harper return to health-care talks to saying they may not need him that much when it comes to improving health care.

Premiers Brad Wall of Saskatchewan and Robert Ghiz of Prince Edward Island announced Tuesday they will lead the charge in a provincially-driven working group to improve health care.

The Health Care Innovation Working Group will focus on the provinces and territories finding and sharing new ways to meet health challenges, including the needs of seniors, patients with chronic diseases and northern populations.

The group is tasked with providing its first report in July to the next meeting of the Council of the Federation in Halifax. Premiers and territorial leaders are slated to wrap up their winter meeting in Victoria on Tuesday.

“That’s really what it’s about, looking for innovation, looking for best practices,” said Ghiz. “It’s about best practices amongst the provinces. It really has nothing to do with the federal government. We’re in a situation where we know across Canada that certain provinces are doing things differently than others.”

He said many provinces, including PEI and British Columbia, are looking for new and innovative ways to provide care to growing populations of elderly people.

Ghiz said he expects provinces to share approaches to providing more home-care for seniors as opposed to long-term hospital care.

The seniors issue has dominated the Victoria meetings because the premiers say Ottawa’s plan to fund health-care on a per-capita basis is more costly to provinces with high populations of elderly people because health costs rise as people age.

The working group will focus on saving dollars while providing the best and most up-to-date health services to Canadians.

“We’re going to do our work,” said Wall. “The federal government is not needed for this work. They don’t deliver health care. The expertise is in the provinces and the territories.”

The premiers also agreed that Manitoba Premier Greg Selinger will head a group aimed at crunching the numbers to determine how Ottawa’s imposed funding formula will impact individual provinces and territories.

“Our jurisdictions are impacted in different ways,” B.C. Premier Christy Clark said at the wrap-up news conference.

“We’re committed to working together to ensure no jurisdiction is worse off.”

The premiers headed into the two-day meeting with those in the resource-rich West comfortable with Ottawa’s suggestion that it will hand over cash — albeit a smaller amount after 2017 — and get out of the way to allow province’s to work out standards on their own.

But provinces east of Manitoba were angry with the edict and this week’s meeting appeared to do little to mollify that.

“What essentially we are going to do is do what the federal government should have engaged us in doing in a discussion on the outcome of these transfers,” Quebec Premier Jean Charest said at a news conference.

“That’s what Greg Selinger will lead as a discussion, and we’ll do it without the federal government, since they have decided to drop out.”

Harper upset the premiers Monday when he was adamant that Ottawa has no more health money for the provinces, but the premiers said they’re not quitting yet because “No” is sometimes the starting point when it comes to federal-provincial relations.

Harper, in Saguenay, Que., remained firm Tuesday on his stand that no further health money is coming to the provinces.

“I think we have been very clear on transfers,” said Harper.

“I hope the provinces will concentrate on I think what Canadians expect, not a debate about money but really an examination of what we really need to do to better deliver health care services.”

Wall and Ghiz said the working group has the ability to provide the provinces with a national perspective on what’s working with health care when it comes to innovation, best practices and saving costs.

He joked that he and Ghiz won’t employ a good-cop-bad-cop routine, but said the two premiers are intent on getting good information from the provinces and health ministers will soon discover that “Robert Ghiz is a scary man.”

The premiers and territorial leaders have been meeting in Victoria since Sunday, and many have been highlighting high-tech as another means to reducing costs.

The group began by touring an ultra-modern patient-care centre equipped with single rooms, smart beds and healing gardens _innovations that B.C. Premier Christy Clark said contributes to more comfortable and shorter hospital stays.

Last month, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty enraged premiers from Manitoba east with what some described as a take-it-or-leave-it plan. The scheme calls for current spending levels of six per cent annually until 2017, followed by increases tied to the rate of economic growth.

Those increases are expected to be about four per cent annually, but Flaherty said they will never drop below three per cent.

Clark originally supported the federal plan, but raised concerns about funding health care on a per capita basis because it punishes provinces with larger populations of elderly people.

The premiers have directed most of their public attention towards bringing Harper back to the table, but the direction shifted Tuesday with the premiers forming the working group.

“We have different ways of moving ahead and introducing innovations to strengthen health care,” said Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty at a news conference. “We’ve got to find a way to do this together.”

Wall said the federal government may start feeling pressure from Canadians when they see the provinces working together to improve health care and save money.

“Our constituents are their constituents, we get that there’s one taxpayer,” said Wall, who added that federal MPs will be hearing from Canadians, “especially as they see progress from the provinces and territories in terms of results on health care.”